Well friends, here it is, An Ængliscmans Partyta for solo violin. And it can be yours at the click of a button! Do buttons click? Some of them clack. Others ping or bing. I guess I didn't really think that one through. Anyway, if you like pinging, binging, clicking and/or clacking, I have a feeling this one's for you!

I still don't know how to embed YouTube videos on this forum, so here's the video.

Well friends, here it is, An Ængliscmans Partyta for solo violin. And it can be yours at the click of a button! Do buttons click? Some of them clack. Others ping or bing. I guess I didn't really think that one through. Anyway, if you like pinging, binging, clicking and/or clacking, I have a feeling this one's for you!

I still don't know how to embed YouTube videos on this forum, so here's the video.

I'll be fleshing out a sketch idea for solo violin soon, and your piece provides just that much more inspiration about the sonic possibilities of the instrument. Quite excellent.

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"l do not consider my music as atonal, but rather as non-tonal. I feel the unity of all keys. Atonal music by modern composers admits of no key at all, no feeling of any definite center." - Arnold Schoenberg

Very evocative piece, I like the the slower-paced very concentrated kind of mood the partita evokes. The use of artificial harmonics (I presume) where very colorful, quite a lyrical piece too. I found your use of musical space and form over the six movements to be intriguing (as it's something I'm trying to find within my own stylistic aesthetic).

Yep, I liked it a lot!

It's cool, I just didn't want to make a liar out of you. (ugliest emoticon ever created?) One time there was someone (ain't namin' names) who expressed interest on the day of release but ended up actually listening to it over a year later, even then only after I happened to bring it up. Anyway, thank you so much for listening!

There are quite a lot of harmonics in there, artificial or natural I couldn't really say, I guess it'd be in the library manual, but I didn't really look it over too thoroughly. I tried to have a good mix of vibrato and non-vibrato sounds, since the violin patch I ordinarily use (LA Scoring Strings) is all vibrato sustains all the time. I ended up using this one (Chris Hein Solo Violin) because it has a broader array of articulations, even though the legato transitions are not sampled and just consist of super-fast pitchbends and sound goofy as hell. The LASS violin has properly sampled transitions, and you can break them in a variety of interesting and totally unique ways, but for a full-on solo violin composition I really wanted to not be tied down by realism — there are still some limitations on that front, but I felt it was a worthwhile compromise, so didn't go poking around under the hood.

Here's the first in a new series of short pieces that I'll be uploading only on YouTube. It's basically just going to be like a sketchpad, things dashed out in an hour or so for fun. I'd been meaning to start it for a while, but hadn't had any ideas. Today is a friend's birthday, so I decided to write a little piece for him.

That's the idea! Although I didn't start the series for this reason, the game I'm working on is now making strong progress in its development, so I will soon have a lot less time to be composing longer works of my own, but I can probably keep up a steady string of fun miniatures. Short pieces were my bread and butter as a kid (I learned to compose on a demo version of a guitar tablature software which would only allow you to save roughly 16 bars of music per file, depending on other factors) so it'll be quite fun to return to that form now, and I imagine many of the short pieces will inspire longer works in a similar style when I have the time to realise them.

Dan/Crudblud, I've been really enjoying the hell out of your work lately, I downloaded around 9 of your albums from your site and have been putting them on over the past week. I've almost collapsed on my computer (I just watched twin peaks episodes 5/6 TWICE today, 5 being two re-watches, lol) from tiredness but I will follow this up tomorrow.

Thank you so much, I'm sincerely very flattered. These are just the positive vibes I need coming my way, soundtrack work has been kicking my ass lately.

I'm about to watch episode 6, btw, we can confer in the Peaks thread later.

Thank you, I'm so glad you're enjoying them! I don't really ever hear about people getting that into my music, so it's really gratifying to hear this from you. Salami is the only piece I have substantially revised, and now I'm not happy with the revision, so there may be another majorly different version coming in the next year or so, if I have the time to do it. By the way, two of my favourites of the past few years that people seem to avoid for some reason are Urgynes and Problem Zero; I don't know if you've heard them already, but while I've got you hooked I might as well push more of this crap.

And I checked out earlier stuff like "The 20th Century" and The Salad, which are very fascinating to hear

I do sense a sort of kinship as a composer, we've both been influenced quite strongly by certain composers. Though, while I'm still stuck having to rely on musicians to do my dirty work with my classical compositions, you've kinda taken the synclavier idea (but in the 21st century) and really run with it, which I admire. There's some really cool stuff I've heard there so far, still listening of course

Using computers to make music just started as a dumb little thing to do after school when I was around 11 or 12 or so. My friend showed me this goofy demo software and I started playing around with it when I should have been doing my homework. As I got more and more into it, it started to become more of a thing where I was realising, in some way, the things I wanted to play with a real band (I wanted to do technical metal cribbing from Dream Theater, Zappa, Primus, Atheist etc.), but couldn't because I was a crappy guitar player and I didn't know many people who would be interested in trying to play ridiculously hard stuff for fun. Fortunately, computers don't need to learn how to play instruments or how to coordinate themselves, as long as they have the right software they can do whatever you need. So I was developing my skills composing for computers out of necessity, and by the time I got serious it was something I was quite comfortable with, although I don't think I was any good at it.

I would never recommend computers over live musicians as a general rule, because they're as different if not more so than, say, a violin is from a xylophone. As a composer, you'll know that writing for an instrument requires a certain familiarity with that instrument, its strengths and weaknesses, particular techniques, limitations etc., and it's the same when considering the computer. Lots of composers these days use scorewriter software to create MIDI mock-ups of pieces intended to be played by live musicians, but they invariably end up sounding terrible, because no matter how much money they spend on sound libraries, they don't consider that the computer is not an interpreter but an absolute executor of instructions, and you have to not only be a composer but a conductor as well, guiding it in every element with as much precision as possible. The stock MIDI library can produce as "natural" (though not "realistic"*, obviously) sounding a render as a super expensive orchestral library if you only take the time to make the score computer friendly. It's quite different to giving a score to someone who can actually think and make their own decisions. I wouldn't say one is easier than the other, of course, but it is something to bear in mind that most people don't seem to consider at all.

Anyway, while I was doing that "MIDI metal" stuff I eventually met some people who encouraged me to start releasing music to the public, and I started working on The Salad, by which time I had already been exposed to a lot of different music. In particular I had started to listen to John Zorn, Mr Bungle, Captain Beefheart (I had known him before, but I got seriously into his stuff around 2007), Merzbow, Cop Shoot Cop, Boris, Throbbing Gristle, Foetus and others, and I kind of ended up imitating a lot of that and throwing it all together. The Salad was (still is) a goddamned mess! But it was my mess. Hard to believe that'll be ten years old next year, but given how different it is from what I'm doing today, it does almost feel like a previous life. The 20th Century is easily the best, most consistent thing I did pre-2012, after that I started to get into free improvisation and put out some really lame stuff, particularly in 2010. I put out lame stuff in 2011 as well, but that was a whole other level of embarrassment. One thing you might notice in those early albums, where the computer is used, is that my rhythms are very metronomic, I was writing usually at a resolution of 1/16, 1/32 at the most, whereas these days I use the finest grain resolution I possibly can, 1/128 or higher.

I don't mean to ramble on, but I don't get asked or prompted on this stuff very often, so it tends to spark an attack of logorrhea when I do. Anyway, thank you so much for the kind words, I really appreciate it.

*The topic of realism in MIDI rendering is somewhat irritating for me, since it assumes that the goal of all music made with computers is ultimately to create a simulation of live performance. I am trying, in what small way I can, to fight that assumption. If my work proves to have any reach and lasting impact, it will likely be felt in the emancipation of the goofiness achievable only through the exploitation of MIDI systems and sound libraries.

Using computers to make music just started as a dumb little thing to do after school when I was around 11 or 12 or so. My friend showed me this goofy demo software and I started playing around with it when I should have been doing my homework.

Okay, I’ll say it: Your mind was engaged, so playing around with the goofy demo software was your homework, in effect.

Here's the first in a new series of short pieces that I'll be uploading only on YouTube. It's basically just going to be like a sketchpad, things dashed out in an hour or so for fun. I'd been meaning to start it for a while, but hadn't had any ideas. Today is a friend's birthday, so I decided to write a little piece for him.